LITMIR.BIZ

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was like a cell – small, and with a window placed high in the wall. They had intended to decorate before Lucy was born but had failed to find the time. After Lucy’s birth there had been even less time. The wallpaper showed a trellis with a stylized clematis growing up it. In places the wallpaper was coming adrift from the wall, a process which Lucy had actively encouraged, revealing another wallpaper beneath, psychedelic swirls of orange and turquoise from the 1960s.

      Sally had dreaded coming here. She had known that the room would smell of Lucy, that everywhere there would be reminders. But it had to be done, sooner or later; in the long run avoiding the room would be worse. She sat down heavily on the bed, which was covered with a duvet whose design showed teddy bears gorging themselves on honey and apparently oblivious of a squadron of enormous bees patrolling the air around their heads. The duvet had been Lucy’s choice, the bribe which had persuaded her to move from her cot to a proper bed.

      Automatically, Sally began to tidy the books and toys which were scattered on and around the bedside table. Were all four-year-olds like this? Was chaos their natural environment? Or was Lucy exceptional in this as in so much else?

      The book they had been reading on Thursday evening was lying between the bed and the wall. Sally rescued it and marked the place they had reached with a scrap of paper. She ran out of energy and let herself fall back on the bed. She buried her face in the pillow. Why did children smell sweet?

      She supposed that she should pray for Lucy. It was then that she realized that she had not read the Morning Office today, or indeed the Evening Office last night. Discipline and regular exercise were as necessary in prayer as in athletics. She closed her eyes and tried to bring her mind into focus.

      Nothing happened. No one was there. It was dark and cold and God was absent. It was not that he no longer existed, Sally discovered: it was simply that it no longer mattered to her whether he existed or not. He had become an irrelevancy, something pushed beyond the margins of her life. She tried to say the Lord’s Prayer, but the words dried up long before she had finished. Instead she thought of the severed hand. What sort of person would leave it on a gravestone? Was there a significance in the choice of grave? Perhaps it belonged to a relative of the owner of the hand.

      She hoped the child had been dead when they cut off the hand. The idea that he or she had been chopped up, perhaps parcelled in clingfilm and deep-frozen, made it worse for two reasons: it added an illusion of domesticity to what had been done, and it suggested premeditation and a terrible patience. What could have been the motive for such an action? A desire to hurt the child’s mother? Punishment for a theft, a perversion of the Islamic penal code? Sally tried to imagine a need grown so egocentric and powerful that it would stop at nothing, even the carefully calculated destruction of children.

      She dug her hand into the pocket of her jeans and wrapped her fingers round Lucy’s sock. She thought of herself and Michael, Lucy and the unknown child, the child’s parents, the old woman gobbling pills in the bedsitter in Belmont Road, the diseased and the abused, the tortured and the dying. The human race never learned by its mistakes: it merely plunged deeper and deeper into a mire of its own making.

      At that moment, lying on Lucy’s bed, it became clear to Sally that a loving God would not permit such things. At theological college she had learned the arguments why he might allow suffering. She had even parroted them out for parishioners. Now the arguments were suddenly revealed as specious: at last God was unmasked and revealed as the shit he really was.

      She heard voices in the sitting room, one of them a man’s but neither Oliver’s nor Michael’s. She sat up on the bed and wiped away her tears and blew her nose. There was a tap on the door and Yvonne put her head into the room.

      ‘Mr Maxham’s here. He wondered if you’d be up to having a word with him.’

      Sally nodded, and dragged herself to her feet. ‘Has Oliver gone?’

      ‘About ten minutes ago. He didn’t want to disturb you. He left a note.’

      Sally’s body felt hot and heavy. In the bathroom she washed her face and dragged a comb through her hair. In the mirror her face confronted her: a haggard stranger, pale and puffy-eyed, no make-up, hair in a mess.

      In the living room, Yvonne was standing by the window, her head bowed, an anxious smile on her face.

      ‘This is Chief Inspector Maxham. Mrs Appleyard.’

      A small, thin man was examining the photographs on the mantelpiece. He turned round, a fraction of a second later than one would have expected.

      ‘Mrs Appleyard.’ Maxham ambled towards her, hand outstretched. ‘I hope we haven’t disturbed you.’

      ‘I wasn’t asleep.’ His handshake was dry, hard and cold. She noticed that the hands were a blue-purple colour; he probably suffered from poor circulation. ‘Is there any news?’

      ‘I’m afraid not. Not yet.’ He gestured to a tall man standing by the door to the kitchen. ‘This is Detective Sergeant Carlow.’

      The sergeant nodded to her. He wore a chain-store suit, a dark grey pinstripe whose sleeves and trouser legs were a little too short for him. His skin, his hair and even his eyes looked etiolated, as if he spent too much of his waking life staring at a computer screen under artificial light. His jaw was so prominent that the lower part of his face was broader than the upper.

      Maxham nodded to one of her chairs. ‘Do sit down, Mrs Appleyard.’

      She remained standing. ‘Have you found anything, anything at all?’

      ‘It’s early days.’ Maxham had a plump face, the skin criss-crossed with red veins. Behind black-rimmed glasses the eyes were pale islands, neither grey nor blue but somewhere between. The accent was Thames Estuary, very similar to Derek Cutter’s. ‘As far as we can tell, Lucy just walked out of the back door. She –’

      ‘But she wouldn’t do that. She’s not a fool. She’s been told time and time again –’

      ‘It seems that she and Ms Vaughan had had a bit of a disagreement. Lucy wanted Ms Vaughan to buy her something, a Christmas present, and Ms Vaughan said no. Then Ms Vaughan went upstairs to the bathroom. She left Lucy sulking behind the sofa. Five minutes later, maybe ten, Ms Vaughan comes down again, hoping Lucy had calmed down. But she was gone. The other little girl and boy hadn’t noticed her going – one was watching TV, the other was upstairs with Ms Vaughan. Lucy’s coat’s missing. And so’s Ms Vaughan’s purse. Big green thing – it was in her handbag on the kitchen table.’

      The little madam, Sally thought: she’s not getting away with that sort of behaviour; just wait till I get my hands on her. In an instant she lurched back to the reality of the situation. Her legs began to shake. She sat down suddenly. Maxham sat down, too. He looked expectantly at her. She found a tissue in her sleeve and blew her nose.

      At length she said, ‘I thought Carla always locked the doors, put the chain on.’

      ‘So she says,’ he agreed. ‘But on the back door she’s only got a couple of bolts and a Yale. We think Lucy may have pulled over a stool and climbed up. The bolts had been recently oiled and the catch might have been up on the Yale – Ms Vaughan said she went out in the yard to put something in the dustbin earlier that afternoon, and she wasn’t sure she’d put the catch down when she came in.’

      Sally clung to past certainties, hoping to use them to prove that this could not be happening. ‘She couldn’t have got out of the yard. The fence is far too high for her. And there’s a drop on the other side – she doesn’t like jumping down from a height. There’s a gate, isn’t there, into some alley? It’s always locked. I remember Carla telling me.’

      ‘The gate was unbolted when we got there, Mrs Appleyard.’

      ‘It’s a high bolt, isn’t it?’ Sally closed her eyes, trying to visualize the yard which she’d seen on a sunny afternoon in the autumn. Dead leaves, brown, yellow and orange, danced over the concrete and gathered in a drift between the two dustbins and the sandpit. ‘Was the bolt stiff?’

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